And yet she was not, according to my idea, by any means an ill-favored young woman.  It is true that she wore spectacles; and, as she always desired to have her eyes about with her, she never put them off when out of bed.  But how many German girls do the like, and are not accounted for that reason to be plain?  She was tall and well-made, we may almost say robust.  She had the full use of all her limbs, and was never ashamed of using them.  I think she was wrong when she would be seen to wheel the barrow about the garden, and that her hands must have suffered in her attempts to live down the conventional absurdities of the world.  It is true that she did wear gloves during her gardening, but she wore them only in obedience to her father’s request.  She had bright eyes, somewhat far apart, and well-made, wholesome, regular features.  Her nose was large, and her mouth was large, but they were singularly intelligent, and full of humor when she was pleased in conversation.  As to her hair, she was too indifferent to enable one to say that it was attractive; but it was smoothed twice a day, was very copious, and always very clean.  Indeed, for cleanliness from head to foot she was a model.  “She is very clean, but then it’s second to nothing to her,” had said a sarcastic old lady, who had meant to imply that Miss Dorothy Grey was not constant at church.  But the sarcastic old lady had known nothing about it.  Dorothy Grey never stayed away from morning church unless her presence was desired by her father, and for once or twice that she might do so she would take her father with her three or four times,—­against the grain with him, it must be acknowledged.

But the most singular attribute of the lady’s appearance has still to be mentioned.  She always wore a slouch hat, which from motives of propriety she called her bonnet, which gave her a singular appearance, as though it had been put on to thatch her entirely from the weather.  It was made generally of black straw, and was round, equal at all points of the circle, and was fastened with broad brown ribbons.  It was supposed in the neighborhood to be completely weather-tight.

The unimaginative nature of Fulham did not allow the Fulham mind to gather in the fact that, at the same time, she might possess two or three such hats.  But they were undoubtedly precisely similar, and she would wear them in London with exactly the same indifference as in the comparatively rural neighborhood of her own residence.  She would, in truth, go up and down in the omnibus, and would do so alone, without the slightest regard to the opinion of any of her neighbors.  The Carroll girls would laugh at her behind her back, but no Carroll girl had been seen ever to smile before her face, instigated to do so by their cousin’s vagaries.

But I have not yet mentioned that attribute of Miss Grey’s which is, perhaps, the most essential in her character.  It is necessary, at any rate, that they should know it who wish to understand her nature.  When it had once been brought home to her that duty required her to do this thing or the other, or to say this word or another, the thing would be done or the word said, let the result be what it might.  Even to the displeasure of her father the word was said or the thing was done.  Such a one was Dolly Grey.